When John Seely Brown, of Deloitte and USC, proclaimed that he “would rather hire a high-level World of Warcraft player than an MBA from Harvard,” the world took notice. World of Warcraft is a MMORG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) in which some of the world’s most talented young minds are developing leadership qualities that are on par with some of the world’s most experienced business leaders. World of Warcraft has now become the “de facto training ground for the modern business leader.” Cooper calls out the following key skills that WOW cultivates within its environment:

Virtual teams and seamless collaboration – Raid leaders need their teams as much as their teams need them. And often no one in a virtual raid is in the same physical room — in most cases not even the same city or state.

Visibility and accountability – There are multiple ways you can see how each player is contributing to success. If someone is underperforming, the entire raid usually knows. This means no one — including the Raid Leader — can just coast along.

To learn more about how WOW is training tomorrow’s business leaders, check out the link above!

With National Take Your Dog to Work Day happening on June 26, it’s time to look at how tech companies are embracing dogs in the workplace! Empirical evidence suggests that having a dog at work reduces stress, heart disease, and of course, isolation. It also helps many workers enjoy their jobs much more.

But if your HR department is totally against the idea, there are always plenty of online cat videos! According to the Indiana University Media School’s survey of 7,000 people, watching cat videos made employees feel more positive and energetic and less emotionally negative. Hiroshima University reported that viewing “kawaii” (“cute” in English) things helps focus and concentration. Want to sound informed? Drop the line that Google even includes dogs in its company code of conduct: “Dog Policy: Google’s affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture.”

Theo was a typical analyst — giving presentations, holding meetings, and simply regurgitating the same facts and statistics over and over. The gig was getting monotonous, and quite frankly, boring. So he decided to go back to school — meaning a local primary school full of 5- to 11-year-olds.

Asked what they expected their future in the business world to be like, the kids’ answers weren’t “flying cars” and “moon-based offices” but rather grounded, solid viewpoints.

These kids wanted robots, similar to Siri, Cortana, or Google Now, to be woven into the cloth of the company. “They understood that robots have a purpose and they should be part of the process, not extraneous to it.” Everything was also a game to them, but without passwords…everything was secured by biometrics. “Children expect work to have an emotional connection, not be a hard, grey environment they spend the vast majority of their lives in,” and they want all 5 senses to be engaged. They wanted something other than the pinball machine and two faded bean bags that have become the “afterthought some companies prescribe to.”

Sound cool? To discover more about what you can learn from kids’ views on what the Future of Work will be, check out the above article!